


maybe not the way we thought we planned

by nameless_bliss



Series: An Imbalanced Social Dynamic [1]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Related, Explicit Language, Gen, Lots of Whiskey, M/M, POV Stevie Budd, Past Stevie/David, Post-Episode: s05e03 The Plant, Present Tense, discussion of past relationships, helping a friend move is something that can actually be so personal, if you're looking for a plot it's not here, it's a coda if you squint, referenced sexual content, that's it that's the fic, they sit and talk about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:13:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27273247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nameless_bliss/pseuds/nameless_bliss
Summary: The floor feels less comfortable than it did a second ago. “Isn’t it kinda weird to have a nice, casual chat about that time I had a bunch of sex with your boyfriend?”Patrick giggles again (and Stevie hates him for enjoying this so much). “No, I think it’s weird that my two best friends used to be in a relationship, and you both refuse to talk about it.” He points the bottle at her, an accusatory gesture.“That’sweird.”When Stevie agrees to help Patrick move, she doesn't realize she's also agreeing to reveal her tragic backstory.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: An Imbalanced Social Dynamic [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2014489
Comments: 49
Kudos: 366





	maybe not the way we thought we planned

“Why not?”

Stevie takes another drink, holding her breath while she swallows so the burn of the cheap whiskey misses her throat and hits _just_ the right spot in her chest. “It’s not necessary. It looks good like this.” She squints one eye at the wall and holds up her thumb and forefinger as a frame. “The windows, and the bed right in the middle, it’s like. Cleaner. Curtains would ruin the… lines, or whatever.”

“It doesn’t matter what looks ‘clean’,” Patrick makes air quotes—and they’re sloppy enough to give away that his buzz is starting to kick in. “We need curtains.”

Stevie makes a face. “Why? You’re on the third floor, and the only thing outside those windows is a dumpster and a field. No one’s gonna see you.”

“Yes, but the dresser is right here,” Patrick gestures to the partially-assembled dresser against the adjacent wall. And when Stevie just raises an eyebrow, he shakes his head, like she’s the one being ridiculous. “Sunlight’s gonna hit the shelves _every day._ Y’know what the word is for leaving a sweater on a shelf in an un-curtained room to get washed out by sun damage?”

Stevie manages to keep her muttered “jesus fuck” mostly under her breath. “Lemme guess, is it… Incorrect?”

“Exactly. We need curtains.”

“That’s weird, ‘cause here I thought this is _your_ apartment, and David is very specifically _not_ moving in with you. Why are your décor choices being made by his sweaters?”

He gives her a withering look. “Stevie. He’s taken over an entire cupboard for himself in _Ray’s kitchen,_ you seriously think he’s not gonna own half my dresser?”

She snorts, and takes another drink. The lines on the measuring cup tell her it’s a ten-milliliter sip (the box of Patrick’s dishes is still in the car, and it’s not like either of them were willing to walk all the way down to the parking lot again, so Patrick is drinking right out of the bottle, letting Stevie use the only glass-adjacent vessel in the ‘Kitchen - Misc.’ box). The whiskey may be terrible, but it’s payment for spending the entire goddamn day helping him move, and by now she’s had enough of it that the taste is seeming less and less important. 

“I don’t know how the hell you put up with him,” she says into her cup.

Patrick scoffs, but with a smile. “Yeah, you do.”

She glares at him, trying to formulate a comeback, but… “Whatever.” She gets her legs criss-crossed underneath her, and leans back into the mattress that’s propped up against the wall behind her. “But I don’t put up with him like you do. You think all of his bullshit is _cute_ or something. I just think he’s… entertaining.”

“C’mon, you have to think he’s a _little_ cute.”

“I really, really don’t.”

“But you must have at some point, right?”

Stevie looks at him carefully, eyebrows knit. “Are you trying to get me to say I think your boyfriend is attractive?” 

Patrick giggles his tipsy little giggle. He’s on the floor across from her, sitting inside the hollow center of the disassembled bed frame. He leans back against the bars of what will eventually be the headboard. “My boyfriend _is_ attractive; my boyfriend is the most attractive, and that’s an objective fact, whether you say it or not.” He ignores Stevie’s gagging noises, and barrels right on. “I’m just saying that you did put up with him like that, at some point. So you do get it, a little.”

“Uh, I hooked up with him a couple times, you don’t need to actually ‘like’ him to do that.”

“But didn’t you?”

Something twists in Stevie’s stomach. She blames it on the whiskey, and deflects. “Sorry, I don’t recall agreeing to reveal my tragic backstory today.”

But Patrick is still completely un-fucking-deterred, smile still plastered on his stupid boy scout face. “It wasn’t tragic though, was it?”

Stevie looks at him. Then she looks around the apartment, searching for the joke. The trap. She looks at him again, disbelieving. “Are we really doing this?”

“What? M’just asking.”

“Yeah, and you don’t think it’s—” she shifts; the floor feels less comfortable than it did a second ago. “Isn’t it kinda weird to have a nice, casual chat about that time I had a bunch of sex with your boyfriend?”

Patrick giggles again (and Stevie hates him for enjoying this so much). “No, I think it’s weird that my two best friends used to be in a relationship, and you both refuse to talk about it.” He points the bottle at her, an accusatory gesture. “ _That’s_ weird.”

Stevie scoffs and shakes her head, because she’s not going to look uncomfortable, she is _not_ going to make it obvious that she feels hot and itchy because Patrick is a fucking _nightmare_ who goes around saying words like ‘best friend’ like they’re just words, like they’re words you can just _say_ to someone without giving them a fair warning. He’s awful, and she hates him, and she hates David for putting him in her life; she never had to deal with this kind of bullshit before they showed up and got their little gremlin hands all over her emotions.

“I don’t think we could call that a ‘relationship’,” she says, hoping her monotone sells how uninterested she thinks he should be in this conversation. “Like, _at all._ We hooked up a few times, we stopped, I was interested in more, he wasn’t, end of story.” She takes another swallow of whiskey (50 mil, this time). “There. Now you’re all caught up.”

Patrick hums. “I didn’t know that part.”

“What?”

“That you wanted more.”

Stevie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, believe it or not, I don’t make a habit of telling people about that massive embarrassment. But it doesn’t matter. It was a weird—it was an unfortunate, brief moment of poor judgement, on my part. Fortunately, David was smart enough to shut that down, and we got over it. Really dodged a bullet, there.”

“C’mon, you don’t mean that,” Patrick says (and he’s lucky Stevie is too far away to deck him for trying to tell her what she does and doesn’t mean). “You really think the two of you wouldn’t have been good together?”

“Wh—”

Stevie fumbles, unable to find the words to express how _batshit_ it is that she’s stuck in this conversation with this madman. God, this is the last time she agrees to help someone move, even if there’s booze and pizza on the line. 

“Are you—are you seriously asking me if _your boyfriend_ and I would make a good couple?”

“No, I’m asking if you _would_ have, back then. He’s mine now,” Patrick grins like a big, dumb idiot, “you can’t date him, even hypothetically.”

“Thank fuck,” Stevie snaps, which makes him laugh—god, why isn’t she buzzed enough to find this funny? She knocks back the last of her whiskey. She needs to catch up. Fast.

“Y’gonna answer?”

“There’s nothing to say! It would have been a disaster, it would have been terrible.”

Patrick’s head lolls to one side, while he gleefully picks at the scab of Stevie’s patience. “Really?”

This _fucking—_

Stevie squeezes the handle of her empty measuring cup. She stares Patrick down, daring him to blink first.

“I don’t know,” she says, eventually. “Probably. Maybe. I… don’t know.” She blinks. “Maybe not.”

Patrick keeps smiling. “You seem kinda perfect for each other. You don’t think you could have made it work?”

“Okay, ‘making it work’ is a very low bar. We could have technically made it work and still been a fucking disaster.”

Patrick laughs a little at that. “It’s hard to imagine you together ever being a disaster.” 

“Yeah, well, you didn’t know us back then. We weren’t—”

She stops. 

The words are right there, ‘We weren’t good for each other’, right on the tip of her tongue. But… 

She’s never really thought about it. Not like this, anyway. Not now, with all the distance and emotional clarity and whatnot. Not with honesty. She’s thought about it, and told herself what she thought she wanted to hear, and called it a day. She’s never really, _actually_ put this to words. She’s never had a reason to, before.

Fucking _Patrick._ Goddamn menace.

She holds out her cup. 

Patrick’s smile widens, crinkling the corners of his eyes. He’s apparently too tipsy to get up and walk to her like a normal person, so he wriggles and scoots himself across the floor until he’s at the edge of his bed frame prison, and leans in to pour her a refill. He holds up the bottle with a very loud _look_ until she surrenders and gives him a begrudging cheers. They drink, and Patrick rests against one of the legs of the bed in a sloppy pile of limbs, and Stevie finally, mercifully feels her mind start to soften a little around the edges, and… 

“So, maybe? Maybe we could have.” She shrugs. “Maybe we could have made it work, and it would have been fine. It could’ve—” she scrunches up her lips, weighing the words against each other. “It could have been good. We probably could have been really good together. But it still wouldn’t have been a good idea.”

“What’s the difference?” Patrick asks, and Stevie starts to realize that he’s just asking, that he just wants to know. There’s no trick here, no ulterior motives. He just wants to hear what she has to say. It’s… it’s not terrible.

His face is still stupid, though.

“I mean, you can date someone, and it’s fine, it’s good or whatever, and it still doesn’t _do_ any good. Right? Like—” she waves a hand aimlessly. “We would have dated, and broken up, and then… what? What was the point?”

“I don’t think every relationship needs to have a point. If it’s good, it’s good.”

“Sure, but us _not_ dating is what actually did all the good. If we were together, it would—we wouldn’t—it…” she exhales through her nose, trying to sort this weird, nebulous thing into a string of words that someone else can understand. “I think if we dated, and it worked—if it was, I dunno, _serious,_ or whatever. I think it could have been good, but we would have gotten… stuck. We would have stopped. Because it would be, like… an excuse, y’know? Being like, ‘Oh, I don’t have change, he already loves me. I don’t have to work on myself, or grow, or fix any of my problems, because someone loves me, so I must be fine’. If we were together, I think we’d still be… exactly who we were. Because we would have let each other.” 

She stops. And she frowns. “Does that make any sense?”

Patrick looks at her, with… with _something_ on his face. One of his loud, squishy expressions. “Yeah. I think that makes a hell of a lot of sense.” 

Stevie wrinkles her nose. He usually isn’t this squishy when he talks to her. 

“Fix your face,” she says, when it gets to be too much. 

Patrick laughs and takes an egregiously long drink. The bottle shouldn’t be this empty before the pizza’s even gotten here. 

“But you do, though. You do anyway.”

“Do what?”

“Love him.” Patrick’s face doesn’t change, it’s still happy and squishy and completely fucking innocent of what he’s saying. “You love each other, just not that way. Why’s it different?”

Stevie shakes her head, and then her shoulders, and then it’s like her whole body is shivering. Feeling-induced goosebumps. Totally unacceptable. “‘Cause it wasn’t supposed to happen! It was an accident! It’s a fucking _miracle_ that we manage to tolerate each other; it’s not like we could have _planned_ for that, like you—like when—” She lets out a noise of frustration. “We wouldn’t have been like this, if we were dating. We would have tried to be more—be not as… be like, ‘good’, like relationship-good. We wouldn’t have pushed each other because we wouldn’t want to be… pushy.” She shakes her head again, this a fucking mess, this isn’t working at all. “He wouldn’t have given me shit when he needed to, and I would have put up with more than I should have, because we…”

“You wouldn’t want to risk messing it up?” Patrick offers, and it should be annoying, hearing him finish her sentence should piss her the fuck off, but— 

“Yeah.” Stevie tips her head back, staring at the complicated web of a water stain on the ceiling. “That’s why we didn’t, in the first place. If we fucked up a relationship, that would have been it for us. I guess we thought it would be harder to fuck up a friendship. Probably ‘cause neither of us had ever—”

She frowns, and clears her throat, and takes another drink, because that’s not something she’s ever going to say out loud, even to Patrick. Especially to Patrick.

“But it was the right call. That’s the point,” she says, once she’s sure her voice will sound normal. “We’re better as friends, and not like,” she rolls her eyes, “not like the ‘better as friends’ people use as a consolation prize because you’re not good as a couple; I mean we’re literally _better_ as friends. And even if it fucking sucked at the time, I’m glad David didn’t want—” she stops, and makes herself rephrase that. “I’m glad he wanted to keep me around more than he wanted to date me.”

“Me too,” Patrick says, with that stupid smile.

Stevie scowls. “Thanks.”

“No! I mean—well, yeah, I _do_ mean ‘cause I want him for myself, date-wise—but! But. I also mean ‘cause you need to be friends. He needs you. I can’t imagine you two without each other.”

Stevie cautiously lets her scowl turn to a frown. “Thanks,” she says again, softer.

“D’you think you’d still be together? If you’d tried?”

The whiskey has finally done enough work that Stevie can laugh at the ridiculousness of that question, this conversation, this day, this friendship. “I mean, maybe? But it’d be different, because we’d be different. If we weren’t friends, we’d be, like, _fundamentally_ different people right now. I don’t even know what that version of us would have been, y’know? Maybe we’d be in New York. Maybe I would have sold the motel. Maybe David wouldn’t have opened the store. And—”

She wrinkles her nose. She wants to say this, but she also doesn’t want to _say_ it. She wants to beam the thought directly into Patrick’s head, so she can bypass the embarrassment of making the words happen. 

She draws her knees up to her chest and picks at a threadbare patch in her jeans so she doesn’t have to make eye contact as she says, “Even if it was good, it wouldn’t have been all…” she makes a vague noise.

Patrick leans in, grinning like the bastard he is. “All what?”

Stevie rolls her eyes and flaps a hand at him. “All _this._ All the dumbass look on your face, and your whole… thing, you guys have.”

“What thing?”

“The—the…” she waves her hand some more, hoping she can swat away some of the misery of saying this. “I’m never gonna do the… romance stuff. I’m just not interested; it’s not what I want out of a relationship. But David does, so—” she makes a quiet noise of disgust. “So I’m glad he’s with someone who does… all of it. He deserves that.”

She slams the last of her whiskey as a reward for getting through that ordeal. And she eyes Patrick carefully. Maybe… 

“If I were with him, I wouldn’t be doing the giant cookies, or the songs—” she waits until he starts to take a drink… “or secretly planning the perfect proposal.”

Patrick chokes, sputtering whiskey everywhere. “How d’you know about that?!”

Stevie grins like a goddamn shark. “I didn’t.”

Patrick stares at her, silent, eyes wide.

Then he hangs his head with a weak, punched-out laugh. “Fuck.” He runs a hand across the back of his neck. “Touché, Budd.” 

Stevie indulges in a moment of triumph, but also… “Holy _shit._ ”

“Okay—” Patrick pushes himself into something more of a sitting position, clearly his best impression of sobriety. “But it’s not. It’s not like a _plan,_ s’not like I know it all and I’m just waiting for the specific time, I just…” he shrugs, helpless. “I just know I’m gonna. Eventually.”

Stevie blinks. Somehow, that’s even more insane than if he’d had a real plan. She thinks it’d be easier to hear that he was going to propose tonight than it is to hear that he just _knows,_ he knows it’ll happen at some point, how does he know that? How can he know, how can he _know_ what he wants, with that kind of clarity? Stevie doesn’t even know what she wants right now; how does Patrick know what he wants for the rest of his fucking life, with so much certainty that he doesn’t even feel the need to act on it yet? It’s… 

After a minute, Patrick laughs again. But not in a funny way; in his gross, squishy way. “Y’know, that’s actually why I didn’t ask him to move in with me.”

“You didn’t want to live with him because you want to marry him?” she deadpans. 

“Yeah,” he says, like it’s obvious. “I’ve never lived alone, and I’ve always wanted to. I want to know what I’m like when I’m by myself. And.” He smiles softly, like he’s making fun of himself even as he’s saying it. “And I know this is my last chance. I know that once David and I move in together, that’s it.”

Stevie looks at him for a moment. “That’s gross.”

He laughs again. “I know.”

“Have you told him that?”

“What, that I want to wait to live with him until after we’re married?”

The word punches a small, stunned chuckle out of Stevie’s chest. “Okay, fair. But that’s a nice reason. ‘Lot nicer than what he thinks your reasons are. You should give him a better explanation.”

Patrick sits with that for a moment. “Yeah. You’re right, I’ll… I’ll find a way to explain it. Without the whole…”

“Inevitable proposal angle?” Stevie supplies.

He snorts. “Yeah, ideally wanna keep that part a surprise.” He gives her a pointed look. “You’re gonna let me keep that part a surprise, right? I wasn’t exactly planning on getting to the ‘Tell Stevie’ phase today.”

“I get my own phase? Was that supposed to be before or after the ‘Tell David’ phase?”

“Before.”

She hesitates, then laughs awkwardly. “Why do I get to hear about it before he does?”

“So I can ask for your blessing.” He puts the bottle to his lips. “Obviously.”

That— 

That’s not…

Stevie’s stomach twists into a complicated knot. She feels… weird. Uncomfortable. Her stomach hurts and her face is hot and her fingertips are tingling and she’s not sure she can blame all of it on the whiskey.

So she shakes her head and laughs, because it’s a joke. “Right. Me, not his family, or… anyone else.”

Patrick doesn’t laugh with her. “That’s right.”

She swallows. “Why?”

He laughs now, like _that’s_ the joke. “You know him better than anyone, and you’re _well_ aware of that. And, more importantly, you’re the only person I’d trust to tell me no, if you had to. If you thought it was a bad idea, I’d have to believe you.” He smirks. “And then I’d do whatever it takes to change your mind.”

There’s… there’s a lot she could say to that. But most of it involves her, and she needs this conversation to _stop_ being about her immediately, so she grabs for the first deflection she can think of. “Why don’t you trust yourself to know if it’s a bad idea? Why’s that my job?”

“I’m biased,” he grins. “My judgement could be clouded by the fact that I really, really, _really_ wanna marry him.”

“Have you, like. Thought that through? At all?” She grimaces. “You really wanna be stuck with him, with _David Rose,_ forever?”

 _“Yeah,”_ he says dreamily, resting his cheek on his hand. It’d be kinda cute, if it weren’t so disgusting. “Been thinking about it lots. For a while.”

“Really. You want to put up with that. _Forever._ With the eight million closets of sweaters you’re not allowed to touch, and the lip balms you’re not allowed to move, and the two hours of skin care you’re not allowed to interrupt,” Patrick starts nodding along, determinedly dopey, “and the shrieking and the rants about the value of mohair and the ‘incorrect’s and him being a constant, _massive_ dick.”

Patrick gasps, eyes lighting up like a Christmas tree. “ _Especially_ the massive dick. That’s my favorite part.”

“Oh _god,_ you’re awful!” Stevie stretches out her legs to try to kick the horrible smirk off his face, but she can’t quite reach. 

“But you know I’m right! You _know,_ Stevie!” He catches her flailing foot by the ankle. “My future husband has the _best_ dick—”

“No! No, fuck, fuck off!” She wrestles herself out of his grip and tries to sit up properly. “I don’t wanna hear your opinion! It’s the only dick you’ve had; it could be horrible and you wouldn’t fucking know any better.”

“ _Is_ it horrible?”

Stevie presses her lips together, and she’s silent just long enough for Patrick to burst into triumphant laughter. “See, I don’t need to know any other dicks to know his is the best. He’s so good, so good at…” he looks overwhelmed, “all of it. He’s good at _all_ the stuff, the—”

“Don’t need examples, thanks. We didn’t fuck for long, but we managed to do a majority of ‘the stuff’. I know what it’s like.” She tips her head back. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s kind of a huge slut.” She’s said it to David’s face enough times that she only feels a _little_ weird saying it to someone else’s face instead.

Patrick giggles. “Yeah, it’s great.” His eyes get faraway and soft in a way that’s completely incorrect for the context. “You don’t even—you haven’t even _seen_ the sluttiest he can get, when he’s taking a dick.”

Stevie raises an eyebrow. “Who says I haven’t?” 

She has just enough time to wonder if ‘hey, I’ve pegged your future husband’ maybe crosses a line, before Patrick’s jaw _drops._ “Yesssssssssss, Stevie!” he gasps, like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard. “Isn’t it—it’s just—isn’t it the—” he waves a hand. “It’s _so good,_ right?”

But that could potentially veer into uncomfortable territory, so instead of answering, she asks, “Does he still make that noise when he comes?”

Patrick lets out sloppy, shameless laughter. “Why’s he do that?! Trying to keep quiet because he thinks his moans sound dumb—”

“But it sounds so much dumber when he tries to hold it back like that!” Stevie’s laughing too, now, and she’s not sure if she thinks it’s funny, or if Patrick is just infecting her. “And what’s _really_ dumb is, is his moans sound good!”

“ _Soooooo_ good!”

“Some guys sound fuckin’ stupid, and it’s super ugly, but David actually sounds sexy when he lets himself _do_ it.”

“Mmmm, and it’s so much. When he doesn’t try to stop it, he makes _so much_ noise. It’s like—he’s either the stupid quiet sound, or screaming. Those are his only modes.” He laughs. “I’m gonna get so many noise complaints here.”

Stevie hums. “If you managed to get one the _one time_ I let you use my place, that checks out. With your own place, you’re gonna be fucked.” And—oh. She snort-laughs, because she didn’t mean to make that a joke. Good for her.

But Patrick doesn’t laugh. “What?”

“Oh my god, did he not tell you?” She snorts again. “It was like, a _formal_ note. I hadn’t heard from my landlord in years, so. Thanks for that.”

Patrick groans and tries to hide his face in his hands—including the one that’s still holding the bottle. 

“Don’t worry,” Stevie says, “I’m well aware that it wasn’t _your_ fault.”

Patrick makes a noise of despair, and guiltily peeks at her through his fingers.

Stevie chokes on a laugh. “Gross! Do _not_ give me any details.” She knows it’s not _that_ funny (it kind of is, though), but her head is soft and fuzzy, and her stomach is warm, and for some reason she can’t stop fucking laughing, because she’s sitting on the floor with her ex’s boyfriend (future husband?) comparing notes, and that’s objectively weird, but he’s also her friend, and that’s objectively even weirder, and it’s all coming crashing in around her and it’s _funny._ She can’t catch her breath. She can’t even remember what set her off. She’s got the giggles and her eyes are watering and Patrick’s caught on and he’s laughing too, so at least he also thinks it’s funny, which is… nice, maybe. 

And that’s the sorry state they’re in when the door opens.

Even though they’re both still laughing their asses off, Patrick’s face manages to light up as soon as he sees David, which—ew. “Hey!”

David has a fondly amused look, which—even more ew. He sets his plentiful haul of pizza boxes on the kitchen counter. “Woooow. Clearly you two have been hard at work.”

“I will not have _you_ judging anyone about being _hard_ at _work,_ ” Stevie snaps.

“Burn, David!” Patrick cackles, as they both dissolve back into laughter. 

“So this is the thanks I get for running the store by myself all day, so you didn’t have to wait for your day off to start moving?”

Patrick makes an overly-thoughtful noise as he wrestles his phone out of his pocket. “Uh-huh, so you closed the store at 5, did _everything_ on the closing checklist, ordered pizza, and brought it back here, all by… 5:27?” He bats his eyes. “Does that sound right?”

David’s whole posture tilts, dropping into something offended and defensive. “Well. If this is how you’re going to be, I’ll just take _my_ pizza, and go eat it with people who appreciate me. This whole,” he waves a hand toward them, “ _thing_ you have going on here? Bad. I don’t like it. What’s got you so _giggly,_ anyway?”

Before Stevie can come up with a lie, Patrick says, “We were talking about what you’re like in bed,” without even cracking a smile.

David’s posture shifts again, this time scrunching up in carefully-repressed horror. He clears his throat. “Only glowing reviews, I’m sure.”

“Oh, of course.”

Stevie curls her lip at the noise coming from Patrick’s eyes. “Ew.”

Patrick grins. “So if you’re not gonna let us have the pizza, can you head out? Stevie and I wanna get back to talking about how annoying you are.”

David arches an eyebrow. “You just said it was about how I am in bed.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive,” Stevie says, only letting herself smile after Patrick breaks into a fresh wave of giggles. 

“Wow, I hate this!” David snaps with forced brightness. “So I guess this apartment isn’t going to be a safe space for me.”

“Tell that to the curtains,” Stevie mutters.

Patrick gives her a warning look as he starts sloppily getting to his feet, managing to trip over the bed frame twice as he tries to escape its confines. David—despite his previous complaints—is already opening and arranging pizza boxes. He unfolds a napkin to use as a plate for his carefully-selected slice, then frowns as he surveys the disarray of the apartment, undoubtedly noting the lack of chairs.

“Here,” Patrick lays down the throw blanket that he’d insisted on digging out of the pile of bedding in his car. “I haven’t swept yet; the floor’s kinda dusty.”

David makes a noise of disgust, and he’s clearly pretending to be very upset as he tries to sit with as much dignity as possible. But he’s not as good of an actor as he thinks. Stevie can see the dimple in the corner of his mouth, the way his eyes soften once Patrick turns away and can’t see it. 

It’s gross. Like they always are. But now, with… 

God, with the context Stevie’s been given, it’s even worse than usual. Because it makes sense. For all the shit she gave him today, Stevie can… kinda see it. She can see Patrick doing this forever. He’ll be a dick about it, with all his snark and teasing complaints, but he’ll still do all of it, the whole fucking list. 

So, maybe… Maybe it’s not actually as different as she thinks. It’s just their usual bullshit, their back and forth and cartoon eyes and balance of sarcasm and sincerity, just… for longer. Maybe for them, marriage is just being there to put down a blanket so no one gets dirt on their stupid, thousand-dollar jeans. 

Stevie frowns. She’s either too drunk or too sober for this, and she doesn’t know which one.

She manages to stand up with slightly more grace than Patrick. And if she intentionally chooses to walk over David on her way to the kitchen so she can ‘accidentally’ kick him in the shin, well. So be it.

By the time she gets to the pizza, David has already launched into a very passionate and _thorough_ story about some shit he had to deal with at the store, speaking around mouthfuls of pepperoni. Patrick interjects “uh-huh”s and “wow”s at all the right moments while he gets his pizza—ham and green olive, his favorite, despite David’s insistence that those topping choices are an abomination. The gesture of it doesn’t go unnoticed, as Patrick picks up a slice, and gives Stevie a knowing smile and—oh _god,_ he tries to wink.

Stevie puts her middle finger in her mouth and pretends to gag on it, then steals the pizza from out of his hands. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was sponsored by the phrase "I wrote this for me, but you can read it if you want". I have a lot of feelings about David and Stevie's friendship, and the only kind of fic I know how to write is the kind where two characters sit in one place and talk about nothing for several thousand words. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Title taken from "Dearly Departed" by Marianas Trench.
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading! I'd always love to hear from you, either here or over on my [tumblr](https://my-nameless-bliss.tumblr.com/post/633409253901746176)! Stay inside, wash your hands, and take care of yourselves!


End file.
